


Flashback: Sherlock's First Murder

by wheel_pen



Series: Nicobar [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, BDSM, F/M, Nicobar, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 22:28:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4683662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the Garden girls has been murdered, and Mycroft thinks his deviant younger brother might have some insight as to how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flashback: Sherlock's First Murder

**Author's Note:**

> The bad words are censored. That’s just how I do things.  
> This story is set in a fictional modern country where slavery is legal. There is a huge disparity between the very rich, who sequester themselves in luxurious compounds, and the rest of the population.  
> Inherent in slavery and other forms of subjugation are dubious consent, unhealthy relationships, and violence.  
> I hope you enjoy this AU. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe.

_A few years ago_

The security guard was maddeningly unforthcoming about why Sherlock and Molly had been summoned to the Gardens. Sherlock had several theories, of course, which he sorted through and discarded as they walked through the humid atrium. He supposed Molly really _hadn’t_ been summoned; she was just with him at the time, and wanted to know what was going on in her former workplace. And after the guard had objected to the idea of her tagging along, Sherlock had insisted on it.

Something interesting was definitely happening. The Gardens were closed to the public and security was everywhere. Sherlock reordered his list of theories and allowed himself to get a tiny bit excited.

“Wait here,” said the guard, stopping them by a goldfish pond. He went off towards the suites, where security seemed to be concentrated.

“What do you think is going on?” Molly asked predictably, nervously. She clutched his hand tightly.

“I hope it’s a murder,” Sherlock told her, unable to hide all of his eagerness. Molly drew a sharp breath in alarm and Sherlock frowned at her. “Well no one’s going to get killed right _now_ ,” he pointed out. “And you don’t even work in the Gardens anymore.” This didn’t seem to comfort her much.

“There’s Madeleine and Beatrix,” she noted of a cluster of young women a few yards away, near a spray of birds-of-paradise. “Can I go talk to them?”

“Find out what they know,” Sherlock allowed, releasing her. “Doubt it’s much, though.” Garden girls, despite their excellent opportunities to study humanity, were not very observant at all, in his experience.

Greg approached across the thick grass, his eye momentarily drawn to Molly as she left Sherlock. “What are those marks on her back?” he asked Sherlock, staring at the rows of small red circles visible from her backless dress.

Greg was a master of irrelevant questions. “Experiment,” Sherlock dismissed. “What’s going on?”

“Follow me,” Greg told him instead, leading him towards the bank of suites set discreetly behind some tree ferns. Sherlock tried not to get his hopes up; everything around here was _dull_ , and he wouldn’t be surprised if all this fuss was over something boring like a stolen purse. Sometimes he thought he was going to go out of his mind with nothing to do—his experiments were the only bright spot and Mycroft kept a tight leash even on _them_. The only thing _more_ boring than his current life was the jobs Mycroft suggested to him.

They went into a hall, dim and cool after the brightness and warmth of the Gardens, the bedrooms for Garden girls (and boys) and their clients branching off in both directions. Sherlock had never been in one before; he had his own room in the house, which was far more comfortable and private. Outside of one room, its door discreetly shut, stood Mycroft and a stranger who was obviously a city police inspector. More than a purse-snatching, then.

Mycroft did not exactly look happy to see him, but that was normal. “Inspector Miller of the City Police,” he introduced to Sherlock perfunctorily. “My brother, Sherlock Holmes.”

“Our local violent deviant,” Greg added dryly. No one objected to this characterization and only Inspector Miller batted an eye.

“What can you tell us about _this_?” Mycroft asked Sherlock soberly, finally opening the door to the bedroom, which Sherlock had been impatiently waiting for.

His eyes flickered quickly over the scene from the doorway. One of the Garden girls lay face down on the bed, obviously dead. She was bound in rope, and there were strange red marks on her exposed skin. That was the centerpiece, the real eye-catcher; but Sherlock knew better than to neglect the rest of the room and all it could reveal.

“I could’ve told you more before you cut her down,” he said scornfully. Inside he was leaping up and down with excitement.

Glances pinged between the other three men—Miller suspicious, Greg amazed, Mycroft… satisfied. “How do you know she was strung up?” Miller demanded, because someone had to.

“Perfectly obvious,” Sherlock insisted. Sometimes he was proud to explain his deductions, but in this case they were not very difficult, and only wasted time. “Angle of the rope burns and scratched paint on the pipe up there,” he finally said, when the inspector just looked at him.

Mycroft nodded as if deciding bringing Sherlock in had been the right call. “Put all your experiments to good use,” he suggested, “and tell us what made those marks on the girl.”

Sherlock hoped that wasn’t _all_ they wanted from him, but he approached the bed anyway and pulled a notebook out of his pocket, leaning in to peer at the marks closely. Then he started to sketch the pattern he saw, realizing when one set of marks overlapped another, teasing out the individual lines and tracing their length across the skin.

“Mmm… Lovely,” he murmured, half to himself. “Very good work. Very interesting. He made this himself,” he went on, flipping to a new page to draw an object that could’ve made the marks. “Spent a lot of time on it, keeps it in very good condition. Beautiful.”

He looked up to see the other three staring at him uncomfortably. He tried to remember that they all had small minds, and if they could have appreciated this on their own, they wouldn’t have called him in. Which would have been a shame.

“Made _what_ himself?” Greg finally asked, and Sherlock handed over the sketch to him. The object looked roughly like a small cat o’ nine tails.

“About two dozen individual whips made of very thin leather,” Sherlock described, “each knotted at various places by hand. Oh, and the handle—“ He took the paper back and quickly added to it. “—would most likely be about this thick and this long, at least that would let you apply maximum force without tiring your arm too quickly.” He paused to stare at the resulting whip enviously, imagining the feel of it in his hand, the sound it would make surging through the air, the smell of the leather as it warmed with use. “A work of art.”

There was a pause, then Greg snatched the paper from him. “Okay, thanks,” he said awkwardly.

Inspector Miller was watching Sherlock _very_ suspiciously now. “Where’ve _you_ been for the last few hours, then?” he asked, and Sherlock rolled his eyes. No wonder the cities were so full of crime, the inspectors were always wasting time chasing the wrong people.

“It’s not him,” Greg said firmly, which was slightly unexpected. “We’ve got this guy on camera.” He turned to include Sherlock in the conversation. “Always keeps his face hidden. But it’s clearly not _you_.”

“ _Clearly_ ,” Sherlock agreed sarcastically. “I’m not a left-handed, five-foot-ten sailor.”

Everyone goggled at him, which Sherlock generally enjoyed; but right now his mind was engaged sifting furiously through the facts, of which he had too few.

“How’d you—“ Miller began.

“Perfectly obvious!” Sherlock snapped, again. “ _And_ , I haven’t left the compound for three weeks, so I couldn’t have done the others.”

This time, he took a moment to appreciate the goggling, because he was proud of his ability to reach beyond the hermetically-sealed world of the compound and learn what other people didn’t want known. “How’d you know there were others?” Miller asked, predictably.

“I hear things,” Sherlock dismissed, in an immodest way. He looked at Greg again. “What else do you know?”

Greg opened his mouth to answer but Miller cut him off. “Hang on. I still want to know his recent whereabouts.”

Sherlock noticed that neither Greg nor his brother rushed to his defense again. Fine, he didn’t have anything to hide, it was just tedious to take himself out of the investigation mindset. “I was with Molly doing an experiment for the last hour, which your man interrupted,” he relayed impatiently, glaring at Greg. “Before that I was running all over the house trying to find a live octopus. I finally got one from the aquarium. They were not at all helpful,” he added darkly. You would think marine biologists would appreciate his scientific quest.

“Yeah, I think I got an email about that,” Greg confirmed dubiously.

“A live octopus?” Miller asked in confusion. “What was _that_ for?”

Sherlock growled in frustration. “My experiment!”

“Right, so while this guy was here torturing a slave girl with a whip,” Greg summarized, “you were somewhere else, torturing a different slave girl with… an octopus?” His tone said his career had hit a new low.

“Basically,” Sherlock agreed, frowning as Mycroft sighed. An airtight alibi ought to be a _good_ thing.

“Well, that clears him, then,” Greg concluded to Miller briskly. “He’s hit three times before,” he went on to Sherlock, “at Mallowrose, Seahampton, and Foxbridge—“

“And everyone’s kept it quiet,” Sherlock surmised dryly. “Wouldn’t want to panic anyone, drive them away from spending money at the Gardens.” He clapped his hands suddenly and couldn’t contain a little jump of excitement. “I love serial killers! Always something to look forward to.”

Greg tried to ignore that as Mycroft rolled his eyes. “Gets in to the compounds with the ID of a local, all different, all claim it was stolen—“

“Of course they were stolen!” Sherlock exclaimed. He was beginning to worry that the lesser minds surrounding him would sap his own intelligence, they were so resistant. “Probably picked their pockets while they were eating lunch on the waterfront. No one ever looks at ID photos anyway. Did you check which ships were in those ports on the days of the murders?” he accused.

“Yes, we did actually think of that,” Miller responded, sounding a bit peevish now, which was just unhelpful. “There’s only one, the _Winston Churchill_. But there’s no name in common on all the shore leave lists.”

Sherlock spun around the room in frustration. “You’ve never been in the Navy!”

“Neither have you!” Greg pointed out, being completely irrelevant again.

“The official shore leave lists are useless, sailors swap out all the time,” Sherlock tried to tell them. He started to pace, his mind churning through the possibilities, discarding ideas that didn’t fit the puzzle. “He’s charming, persuasive, intelligent but not brilliant,” he judged. “He does the same thing each time, because it _works_.”

“Why a Garden?” Mycroft asked, and Sherlock turned to him suddenly, having quite forgotten he was there. He leaned quietly in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “There’s many other brothels he could’ve gone to, with less security.” Some of them wouldn’t even mind his predilections, if he paid enough money.

Sherlock knew he could answer this. He just had to turn the puzzle the right way, see what it looked like from a different angle. “He’s familiar with them,” he realized suddenly. “He grew up in a compound. Not anyone important, son of a cook or groundskeeper—or security chief,” he added with a pointed look at Greg, who rolled his eyes. “He knows where the cameras are, payment procedures, guard schedules. It’s home for him.”

The explanation seemed to make sense to everyone, or at least, no one could refute it. “Common rope, no prints,” Greg went on unhelpfully from his notebook. “In the video he’s got a plain backpack, dunno what happened to it.”

“Backpack and gloves were trashed in different locations on the way back,” Sherlock predicted, buzzing with energy in the small room. “He’ll return to the ship exactly as he left.”

“There’s a thousand sailors on the _Winston Churchill_!” Miller exclaimed, as if this was somehow important. “We can’t check them _all_. If you’re even right about that—“

Sherlock whirled on the irritating, useless man, sizing him up quickly. “City police inspector. Statistically, likely to be on the take, especially with two small children and another one on the way. Bet you wish you hadn’t bought them that little dog for Christmas, don’t you?” He spat the words out with increasing speed and volume. “Doesn’t really matter if you’re on the take, the killer’s not anybody important. By the way, your wife hates it when you try to cook. You don’t have to check _every_ sailor, just the left-handed white males who are five-foot-ten and grew up in a compound!”

There was silence for a long moment after his outburst. Sherlock imagined their tiny brains trying to comprehend what he’d just said. Well, Mycroft didn’t have a tiny brain, he was willing to concede that. But obviously he couldn’t put things together the way Sherlock could, or Sherlock wouldn’t even be here.

“Can you narrow it down any further?” Greg asked. Shockingly, he seemed to be doing something useful and sorting through the sailors’ records on his phone. “I’ve still got about fifty.”

Miller gave Sherlock a wary glance, as one might a wild dog, and scooted away from him, ostensibly to look over Greg’s shoulder. “Fifty that grew up in compounds?” he questioned skeptically.

“Not one of the search criteria,” Greg admitted. “Have to read the bios.” And while they were doing that, the killer could be destroying evidence, shoring up his alibi, and even sailing away to the next port. “Sherlock—“

“Alright, shut up, everyone!” Sherlock demanded, closing his eyes. It was all there, all inside his head, he just had to concentrate—“Let me think! He’s probably—“

There was a sudden commotion outside the room, shattering the crystalline lattice of logic he was trying to construct. He swung towards the doorway with a snarl, just as Sally burst into the room. Mycroft and Greg moved to stop her, but she stood frozen on the threshold, staring in horror at the girl’s body.

Then she turned her gaze on Sherlock, tears of anger forming in her eyes. “Did _you_ do this to her, freak?!” she accused furiously, lunging at him as if she could kill him herself.

Greg intervened and hauled her back out into the hallway. “He didn’t do it, he’s trying to help us solve it!” he told her, not unkindly. “Okay, Sally?”

Sherlock just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, watching her cry helplessly. “She feels guilty because she was servicing one of your guards instead of supervising,” he claimed. “Oh, hello, Anderson,” he added pointedly, of the new guard on the scene.

Greg turned on him, unexpectedly angry from Sherlock’s point of view, and backed him into the room again. “She’s upset because one of her girls was horribly murdered!” he snapped. “So have a little compassion.”

“Waste of time,” Sherlock dismissed. Compassion was something he didn’t understand, that other people were always talking about, and that frustrated him.

“You were narrowing the list of suspects,” Mycroft reminded him quietly, as Sally was led away to the remaining Garden girls she supervised.

“Right.” This, Sherlock understood, and he closed his eyes again, envisioning a large ship and the many departments it would have, and what kind of people would occupy them. “He’s in a position to do favors. Security? No, not subtle enough, he doesn’t intimidate, he persuades. Dispensary? No, drug addicts are unreliable.” He missed the look that shot between Greg and Mycroft; they knew firsthand how unreliable drug addicts could be, but of course Sherlock had little self-awareness on that point. “Records! Yes!” he exclaimed suddenly, startling them. “File clerk, too smart for his job but he’s not going anywhere, minor disciplinary problems. Tedious, very tedious, but he reads the records all day, finds inconsistencies.”

“Blackmail?” Greg asked, scrolling through the files with his phone. Sherlock had almost forgotten he, or any of them, were there.

“No, favors,” he corrected. “I found this mistake, could be trouble for you later, I can fix it for you in exchange for your shore leave slot. Not suspicious at all.” He was wound tightly now, checking and rechecking his chain of facts for a weak link, teetering on the edge of anxiety that he’d made a mistake and it would all come crashing down around him. “Greg, how many could there possibly _be_?!”

The security chief grinned suddenly. “Just one. Anthony Marks, file clerk in Records, left-handed.” His tone was increasingly amazed as he ticked off every point. “High IQ. Same position for three years, disciplinary history. Son of a nurse at the Stanhope compound.”

“Yes! Absolutely! That’s him!” Sherlock started to bounce around the room in exaltation, heedless of the corpse in the background.

“Says he’s five-eleven, though,” Greg couldn’t help but mention.

Sherlock did not let this intrude on his triumph. “There’s always something,” he dismissed. “Probably lying anyway.”

“We can’t arrest him without hard evidence,” Miller pointed out, but Sherlock didn’t really care about that. There was a reason he hadn’t gone into law enforcement, after all. Too many… laws. That people expected be enforced. “I could probably get a search warrant, though. If he’s got that whip thing—“

“He’ll have it,” Sherlock assured him, utterly confident. “He’d never get rid of it. He’s very proud of it, probably keeps it in a special case. You want to rile him, insult it,” he advised. He was slightly envious of the device, he admitted; but he thought he could easily make one of his own, and the papers would soon be full of photos of it. Now what kind of leather…?

“Let’s get that warrant,” Greg said firmly to Miller.

Sherlock took his celebration out into the hall as they all left the bedroom. There was no high like a puzzle solved—a _real_ puzzle, where no one knew the right answer, or those who did had every reason for concealing it. To overcome all those plans with just what he _saw_ , what he _knew_ —

Mycroft was watching him with a dangerously thoughtful expression. “And how did you find that experience?” he asked his brother, as if it wasn’t perfectly obvious.

“Oh, mildly diverting,” Sherlock downplayed. Now that he’d had a taste, he wanted more, harder, more complex. “Over too quickly, though.”

“Come with me,” Mycroft said, turning towards the interior of the compound with Sherlock at his side. “Let’s talk about some other problems you might find diverting.”


End file.
